Amid the effusion of praise that greeted Born to Run upon its release in 1975, Nik Cohn attempted, in this very magazine, to puncture the myth of Bruce Springsteen. Cohn wasn’t acting completely alone. The New York Times had just published a 2,000-word diatribe against the man not yet known to the world as the Boss, accusing him of fakery, sentimentality, and assorted other crimes against rock. But Cohn was more damning. While admitting that he enjoyed the album for its pomp and “mock-tragic” vision, Cohn declared Springsteen “essentially irrelevant.

The rock-and-roll dream that he so avidly celebrates is dead. Understandably, the people who have raised him to godhood find that hard to accept, for it means the death of their own youth. So they manage one last fling.”

----------------------------------------------The aforementioned articles from 1975 which appeared in the New York Magazine and The New York Times 2,000 word diatribe against Springsteen.